dhcpd.leases(5) dhcpd.leases(5)
NAME
dhcpd.leases - DHCP client lease database
DESCRIPTION
The Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Server keeps a persistent database
of leases that it has assigned. This database is a free-form ASCII
file containing a series of lease declarations. Every time a lease is
acquired, renewed or released, its new value is recorded at the end of
the lease file. So if more than one declaration appears for a given
lease, the last one in the file is the current one.
When dhcpd is first installed, there is no lease database. However,
dhcpd requires that a lease database be present before it will start.
To make the initial lease database, just create an empty file called
/var/db/dhcpd.leases. You can do this with:
touch DBDIR/dhcpd.leases
In order to prevent the lease database from growing without bound, the
file is rewritten from time to time. First, a temporary lease data-
base is created and all known leases are dumped to it. Then, the old
lease database is renamed /var/db/dhcpd.leases~. Finally, the newly
written lease database is moved into place.
FORMAT
Lease descriptions are stored in a format that is parsed by the same
recursive descent parser used to read the dhcpd.conf(5) and
dhclient.conf(5) files. Lease files can contain lease declarations,
and also group and subgroup declarations, host declarations and
failover state declarations. Group, subgroup and host declarations are
used to record objects created using the OMAPI protocol.
The lease file is a log-structured file - whenever a lease changes, the
contents of that lease are written to the end of the file. This means
that it is entirely possible and quite reasonable for there to be two
or more declarations of the same lease in the lease file at the same
time. In that case, the instance of that particular lease that
appears last in the file is the one that is in effect.
Group, subgroup and host declarations in the lease file are handled in
the same manner, except that if any of these objects are deleted, a
rubout is written to the lease file. This is just the same declara-
tion, with { deleted; } in the scope of the declaration. When the
lease file is rewritten, any such rubouts that can be eliminated are
eliminated. It is possible to delete a declaration in the dhcpd.conf
file; in this case, the rubout can never be eliminated from the
dhcpd.leases file.
THE LEASE DECLARATIONleaseip-address{statements...}
Each lease declaration includes the single IP address that has been
leased to the client. The statements within the braces define the
duration of the lease and to whom it is assigned.
startsdate;endsdate;tstpdate;tsfpdate;
The start and end time of a lease are recorded using the starts and
ends statements. The tstp statement is specified if the failover pro-
tocol is being used, and indicates what time the peer has been told the
lease expires. The tsfp statement is also specified if the failover
protocol is being used, and indicates the lease expiry time that the
peer has acknowledged. The date is specified as follows:
weekday year/month/day hour:minute:second
The weekday is present to make it easy for a human to tell when a lease
expires - it's specified as a number from zero to six, with zero being
Sunday. The day of week is ignored on input. The year is specified
with the century, so it should generally be four digits except for
really long leases. The month is specified as a number starting with 1
for January. The day of the month is likewise specified starting with
1. The hour is a number between 0 and 23, the minute a number between
0 and 59, and the second also a number between 0 and 59.
Lease times are specified in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), not in
the local time zone. There is probably nowhere in the world where the
times recorded on a lease are always the same as wall clock times. On
most unix machines, you can display the current time in UTC by typing
date -u.
If a lease will never expire, date is never instead of an actual date.
hardwarehardware-type mac-address;
The hardware statement records the MAC address of the network interface
on which the lease will be used. It is specified as a series of hexa-
decimal octets, separated by colons.
uidclient-identifier;
The uid statement records the client identifier used by the client to
acquire the lease. Clients are not required to send client identi-
fiers, and this statement only appears if the client did in fact send
one. Client identifiers are normally an ARP type (1 for ethernet)
followed by the MAC address, just like in the hardwarestatement, butthis is not required.
The client identifier is recorded as a colon-separated hexadecimal list
or as a quoted string. If it is recorded as a quoted string and it
contains one or more non-printable characters, those characters are
represented as octal escapes - a backslash character followed by three
octal digits.
client-hostnamehostname;
Most DHCP clients will send their hostname in the host-name option. If
a client sends its hostname in this way, the hostname is recorded on
the lease with a client-hostname statement. This is not required by
the protocol, however, so many specialized DHCP clients do not send a
host-name option.
abandoned;
The abandoned statement indicates that the DHCP server has abandoned
the lease. In that case, the abandoned statement will be used to
indicate that the lease should not be reassigned. Please see the
dhcpd.conf(5) manual page for information about abandoned leases.
binding statestate; next binding statestate;
The binding state statement declares the lease's binding state. When
the DHCP server is not configured to use the failover protocol, a
lease's binding state will be either active or free. The failover
protocol adds some additional transitional states, as well as the
backup state, which indicates that the lease is available for alloca-
tion by the failover secondary.
The next binding state statement indicates what state the lease will
move to when the current state expires. The time when the current
state expires is specified in the ends statement.
option agent.circuit-idstring; option agent.remote-idstring;
The option agent.circuit-id and option agent.remote-id statements are
used to record the circuit ID and remote ID options send by the relay
agent, if the relay agent uses the relay agent information option.
This allows these options to be used consistently in conditional evalu-
ations even when the client is contacting the server directly rather
than through its relay agent.
setvariable=value;
The set statement sets the value of a variable on the lease. For gen-
eral information on variables, see the dhcp-eval(5) manual page.
Theddns-textvariable
The ddns-text variable is used to record the value of the client's TXT
identification record when the interim ddns update style has been used
to update the DNS for a particular lease.
Theddns-fwd-namevariable
The ddns-fwd-namevariable records the value of the name used in updat-ing the client's A record if a DDNS update has been successfully doneby the server. The server may also have used this name to update theclient's PTR record.Theddns-client-fqdnvariable
If the server is configured to use the interim ddns update style, and
is also configured to allow clients to update their own fqdns, and the
client did in fact update its own fqdn, then the ddns-client-fqdn vari-
able records the name that the client has indicated it is using. This
is the name that the server will have used to update the client's PTR
record in this case.
Theddns-rev-namevariable
If the server successfully updates the client's PTR record, this vari-
able will record the name that the DHCP server used for the PTR record.
The name to which the PTR record points will be either the ddns-fwd-name or the ddns-client-fqdn.
onevents{statements...} The onstatement records a list of state-ments to execute if a certain event occurs. The possible events thatcan occur for an active lease arerelease and expiry. More than one
event can be specified - if so, the events are separated by '|' charac-
ters.
THE FAILOVER PEER STATE DECLARATION
The state of any failover peering arrangements is also recorded in the
lease file, using the failover peer statement:
failover peernamestate {my statestateatdate;peer statestateatdate;}
The states of the peer named name is being recorded. Both the state
of the running server (my state) and the other failover partner (peerstate) are recorded. The following states are possible: unknown-state, partner-down, normal, communications-interrupted, resolution-interrupted, potential-conflict, recover, recover-done, shutdown,
paused, and startup. DBDIR/dhcpd.leasesSEE ALSOdhcpd(8), dhcp-options(5), dhcp-eval(5), dhcpd.conf(5), RFC2132,
RFC2131.
AUTHORdhcpd(8) was written by Ted Lemon under a contract with Vixie Labs.
Funding for this project was provided by Internet Systems Consortium.
Information about Internet Systems Consortium can be found at:
http://www.isc.org/dhcpd.leases(5)

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